Are cities really
best places to live?

By DAVID L. ULIN
mcclatchy-tribune

Published: July 20, 2013;Last modified: July 20, 2013 11:20PM

Leo Hollis should have had me at the title. His book “Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis” seeks to articulate something I take as an article of faith: Cities are the only place to live.

And yet, even the title highlights some of the problems with this uneven inquiry into urban life. It might have been radical to champion the city 30 years ago, when crime rates were high and the middle-class exodus to the suburbs remained in full swing. We live, however, in a different era, when cities all over the world have redefined themselves, reversing the suburbanizing trend.

With that in mind, do we really need, as Hollis writes, “a rallying cry for the reclamation of the city from the grumbles of the skeptical and the stuck-in-the-mud naysayers”?

This is hardly an academic question; your response will likely determine how you feel about “Cities Are Good for You.” For me, it’s a mixed bag, by turns vivid and pedantic, with a discomforting tendency toward boosterism.

Hollis — who has written two books about London, where he lives — sees the city as a landscape of limitless possibility that may hold the key to our survival, since we are increasingly “an urban species.” He explains: “In 2007 the UN announced that for the first time in human history 50 percent of the world’s population now lives in cities. . . . This number is rising at a rate of 180,000 every day; by 2050, it is projected that 75 percent of the world’s populations will live in cities.”

When Hollis refers to this expanding urban population, he’s not talking about the traditional cities of the West. Indeed, he spends much of the book discussing cities such as Shanghai, Singapore and Dubai, which operate according to a different model.

His overall point, perhaps, is that the Earth is becoming one vast urban matrix. Still, the unanswered question is what it means for the daily life of actual people on the street.